Cyber Dreamscape Battle-Deckers 2199
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content warning:
mild screen shaking, animated violence, gender dysphoria
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A fast-paced card-battle game played on arcade cabinets is a new, local fav in your college town, and the community even has a spot in the city mall to play in! Let's go, CyDream!
"You know it's fictional because there would never be this many out queer people at a game store in the early 2000s."
It's some time in the early 2000s, and Cyber Dreamscape Battle-Deckers 2199 is a digital-only card game that's developed a vibrant and loyal community thanks to its freedom of character expression and the giant game cabinets it's played on. Even in your small US college town, there are players who meet and trade matches at the nearby city mall. For better or worse, the game shop in the mall is the only location close by with an officially-sanctioned CDBD battle arena setup. This has let all kinds of hyper-local tournaments and events pop up at the game shop, with all kinds of players showing up to participate. Unfortunately, it's not all fun and games when not everyone in the community gets along or plays fair- even in a game where you can spectate a brawl between a slime-girl made of bubblegum and a wrestler in a teddy bear mask..!
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Cyber Dreamscape Battle-Deckers 2199 is a card-battle game made for the Game Boy, inspired by shonen card-battle anime and manga of the '90s and early 2000s. It features snappy, puzzle-like card-play using an accessible card combo system built around simple, menu-based interactions. Each of 3 playable characters have their own custom deck, complete with signature cards and varying ratios of attack "staples". They each have their own unique special abilities as well! Taking roughly 15-20 minutes to complete a single tournament story run (told through dialog interactions at a local tournament event being held at the mall game store), simply choose your character and play out their tournament day! Or you can choose a fighter and start a quick single match against any of the game's opponents! There's no wrong way to CyDream~
Browser Controls:
Z / J - Interact/Menu Choice (A Button)
X / K - Cancel (B Button)
WASD / Arrow keys - Movement/Menu Navigation (D-Pad)
Shift/NmPd 0 - Select Button
Enter - Start Button
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Please note: There are still bugs in this release, ranging from causing a previously-used card in your hand to become locked and unusable, to simple CPU attacks doing wild amounts of damage. It's nothing remotely game-breaking, mostly just an inconvenience, but they are there. This project was not meant to run this long in development, so I'm ultimately deciding to release the game for free and without the usual additional zine-style content. However, the game is still complete and playable (and cute and fun!), just be aware that bugs could affect your gameplay.
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Download
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Development log
- Source Files Now On Patreon!Oct 23, 2023
Comments
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Yo! This looks so cool! I'll have to give this a try when I can! If you don't mind sharing, how did you manage to make your card battle system?
Thank you so much! I hope you have fun with it sometime~
The card battle system was a real challenge that never got properly solved, and I'm sure there's better and more efficient ways to do it. The cards (which are kept on background-style image sheets) each have their own variable, plus a bunch more for game stats (damage, characters, abilities, etc.). I used the swap tiles plugin to change the card images in-game, which limited the total number of cards I could include. All of the variables are reset and randomized when you start the game/each match. The rest is just a lot of toggling of variables in-game and math functions to make the cards link together and do the right amounts of damage!
There are official card games on the original Game Boy, like an early Yu-Gi-Oh!, that have way more cards than what I was able to include, but I don't know how they managed to do it. ^^;
Oh interesting! That's a super cool way of doing the cards! Thank you so much for sharing! (^w^)